Search Adorate

Do We Worship One God?

Second post in the series: Binitarian Worship

In the first post (posted on May 28) on this multi-post topic, Binitarian Worship, I related the fact that neither the Bible nor the early church provides an example of believers addressing (praying to, speaking to, singing to) the Holy Spirit.In this second post, I want to explore and emphasize the implications of Trinitarian monotheism.As we will see, the question of praying to the Spirit is intertwined with how we are thinking about the nature of God.

It is one God
and only one God we gather to worship.

“Here, O Israel,
the Lord our God: the Lord is One God.” (Dt 6:4)

“I am the Lord
and there is no other. Besides me there
is no God. (Is 45:5)

“For there is one
God.” (1 Tm 2:5)

However we ultimately
define what we mean by Father, Son, and Spirit we must begin with this
essential and unchangeable affirmation:
It is one God we worship. The one
God who is God. It is to this God and no
other that we direct our praise and prayer.
Get this wrong, or even get is just partly wrong, and we have utterly
lost our way.

In the ancient
world, religion was all about worship. Religion
was not a discussion of theological categories or creedal dogma. The question was always, “What is it that you
worship?” As Larry Hurtado has
demonstrated, worship was what ancient people meant when they talked about
religion. The question of God was not
asking for a paragraph of dogmatic propositions, it was asking how and what you
worship.

The early church
was not persecuted by the Romans for wrong theology (we have to wait for Christians
to do that). They were martyred because
of wrong worship. It was a disagreement
over a little ceremonial issue. A little
offering to Cæsar, if you please. No big
deal. Everybody does it. It’s your patriotic duty. Yet, Christians (at least the faithful ones)
refused even that small compromise in worship.

Forget the
practical for a moment. For now, don’t
worry about the order of songs for this coming Sunday. Think foundational things. And here’s the place we begin: Our songs must be composed by those who
intend to direct our worship to the one God.
Our worship must be led by those who thoroughly understand that we are the
people who believe there is only one God.
Our prayers, our gifts, our adorations: all directed to this one God who
is God. We affirm the very thing the Lord
Jesus said to Satan himself when, challenged in the little matter of bowing
down, he refused and proclaimed, “You are to worship the Lord God and to serve
Him only.” (Mt 4:10; Lk 4:8)

Many Christians assume
we need to directly address (talk to, pray to, sing to, give thanks to) the
Holy Spirit in our worship. Yet, as I
hope you have researched to confirm, the ancient church did not do this. Since they were never prohibited from doing
it, and yet never did it, they only explanation is that they never thought
about doing it. How can something seem
so obvious to many believers today and never seems to have crossed the minds of
the first Christians?

The answers lie
partly in their embracing the full truth of monotheism. There is only One God. When we worship God, no part of God is
standing off on the side wondering why it was left out of that worship. The unity of God is reflected in the unity of
worship. The Holy Spirit in us is to be
understood within the Trinity. Rather
than three slices of a God-shaped-pie, the New Testament writers can then speak
of Him within us as the Spirit of God, or the Spirit of Christ, or Christ in
us, or, of course, the Holy Spirit.

Our urge to clarify
or distinguish this can lead to many questions we cannot answer. That is uncomfortable. Are all three beings inside us? This would bring our spirits-in-residence
population count to four (our own spirit is somewhere in there, too). How can Christ speak of the Paracletos (Comforter,
Counselor, Advocate) as entirely separate from Himself (John 14:16-17, 26;
15:26; 16:7, 13) and, in the same discourse, speak as though He Himself is
the Paracletos (John 14:18, 20, 23; 15:4, 5)?

Let’s pull one paragraph
out of John 14 and see where it takes us: It would really help if you opened
your Bible software and brought up this passage. In John 14:15-23 Jesus says the He will ask
the Father and the Father will send the disciples another Paracletos to be with
them: the Spirit of Truth. Okay, here we
have three: Son (speaking), Father (the
one Jesus will ask), Spirit (the one the Father will send because the Son
asked). Now, keep reading.

Jesus then tells
the disciples they know this Paracletos because He, right then and there, is
living with them and that He (in the future) will be living in them. Then He goes on to immediately tell them that
He (Jesus) is not leaving them orphans because He (Jesus) will come to
them. This equates Jesus with the
Paracletos. Then, to complete the
picture (or blur it even further), Jesus assures them that on that day (when
the Father sends the Paracletos) they will know that He (Jesus) is in the
Father and that the disciples (the “you” in the passage is plural) are in Him
(Christ) and that He (Christ) is in the disciples.

Is that all
crystal clear to you? No? Good.
So, let’s admit it. We have lots
of questions. And, then we have questions
that sit inside other questions. We are
floating in an ocean of question marks. That
is an awkward place to be.

But, far worse, is
when we think we have come up with answers.
Our explanations about God all come out of our incredibly limited fragments
of the picture. Yes, the Bible tells us
all we need to know about God. But it does not come close to telling us all we want to know about God. We cannot fathom any reality outside our own
space-time frame of reference. For
example, someone might say God exists outside time. Fine, but nobody understands what such an existence
would be like. And, on top of that, we
do not know what we do not know.

The explanation
of the ancient leaders and councils of the church summed up in the word Trinity
was never intended to suggest the church needs to worship three deities named
Father, Son, and Spirit. This would be
tri-theism. It is what many Muslims
think Christianity teaches. It is, far
too often, what our sloppy language and theologically uneducated leaders
actually sound like we believe. But, let’s
get this one truth as the basis for all truth: There is only one God. Anything else isn’t just “not quite right.”
It is, to use an out of fashion word, heresy.

Where does this leave
us? Scripture affirms there is only One
God. The explanation the early church arrives at by
Chalcedon (451) is that the Father, Son, and Spirit are three persons (hypostaseis) and the same substance (homoousian). As long as we do not push this too far, the
explanation is true and gives a framework into which all the relevant passages
in the Bible can fit. Trinity is a way
to affirm all that the Bible teaches about God.
It is not a way to come to new information about God. And, remember, the basic framework out of which the doctrine of the Trinity was
articulated was a commitment to preserve monotheism, not to undermine it.

So, where is the
practical pithy heart-warming conclusion to the post? It is simply this: When you write music, plan, lead, or participate
in the worship of the church, frame it out of one thought around which all of
worship must evolve: there is only one
God.

About Adorate.org

Tom Lawson has served as a teacher in higher education for more than 25 years. With his wife, Linda, he is on the faculty at Ozark Christian College in Joplin, Missouri (USA). Throughout his entire career, he has focused on Christian worship, its history and theology. He also currently teaches courses in church history and the Epistle to the Romans.